Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Over at the Alehouse, I learned about an intriguing series of new LEGO-based games coming out this August. Called Heroica, the video below provides an advance look at what we can expect. (The video is in German, which I don't understand well enough to provide a translation, unfortunately)

From what I saw there and read about in the original link, it looks like the Heroica series will build upon the principles of earlier LEGO-based boardgames to produce a dungeon-crawling game, complete with combat and resource management. I can say from personal experience that these LEGO boardgames are quite fun; my 8 year-old son in particular enjoys them. Indeed, when I told him about and showed him Heroica, he expressed great interest in it. I can't say that I'm surprised: he adores LEGO and the only aspect of my Dwimmermount campaign that's grabbed his attention is the use of miniatures and dungeon tiles. Heroica combines those two things together to produce a complete game -- plus it introduces the basic principles of classical dungeon crawling. What's not to love?

I expect I'll be picking these games up for the family once they're available.

27 comments:

Given how many people I've seen using Lego for rpgs and wargames, and the company's moves into boardgames, I've been wondering how long it would take them to come out with something like this. There is a lot of potential in this kind of thing, so I'll be interested to see what they have in store.

The German explanation is only an introduction for people unaware of rpg: "It's inspired by video games .... you don't just play red or green, you play a character ... Heroica takes place in a fantastical world..."

I have seriously considered getting various lego knight figures and using them as miniatures instead of actual minis. You can change out weapons, headgear, etc. quite easily. The only problem is that it's difficult to find a broad selection, and I got rid of the ones I had growing up ages ago.

I have it and have played it many games. The short game (1 guy home wins) has been fun for non-gamers as well as my serious gaming buddies. The long game (all guys home to win) is in some ways even more fun, bringing out a lot of political maneuvering and strange stretegies.

The rules actually encourage you to customize the dice and create your own rules variations (they give a few examples) which has a very old-school game principle vibe to it.

We used legos all the time to suplement our metal figures, we would premake walls and set them down using the random dungeon generator in the DMG to kill an afternoon. I also remember running all of UK 7 Dark Clouds Gather using legos including building the flying manta ray thing for the final battle in the sky.

Seems like each player has their own "character sheet" in the form of a small LEGO platform with removable tokens

That "character sheet" is called "backpack" in the game, and the woman explains that you can take your equipment ("weapons and potions") won in one "level" to the next "level" (= box) to fight another "end evil one", even in German ("Endböser") a very clunky term for "boss monster".

"character sheet" is called "backpack" in the game" etc.Well. That's BrickQuest and it's been around as a free rules set since 2003. I'll go out on limb and say Heroica will be inferior because A) BQ uses full sized minifigs with all the equipment options b) 90% of the Lego games suck wind. They ship with superficial and often broken rules which the buyer is encouraged to "customize" ie fix to make a playable game. Check their ratings and reviews on Boardgamegeek.

Way back in my middle school days, I used to play a fairly simple Wargame for recreating WWII battles. We did the massive D-Day invasion with LEGO. I would not be surprised to find out that Gary or Dave used it in their games at some point(?) Anyway, I have two hellions(kids) that will love this stuff ... Bad Rules? all the more fun for Dad to fix!

My son and I are now playing "Minotaurica", which introduces the Minotaur of Minotaurus into Heroica. We replaced one of the die-tiles with the black one and when you roll it that player gets to move the Monotaur and try and catch another player. When it does that player has to return to the last 'door' (save point) that hero went through. Very fun to combine the Lego Games elements with one another...

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